Conversations with Cocktails: Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility

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Rules of Civility is a great deal of fun. A gas! A lark! “Driver,” says secondary character Bitsy, “find Madison Avenue and start driving up it.” All the characters are snappy-talking New Yorkers. Rarely is a conversation had without cocktails.

The novel tells the story of three people — boardinghouse roommates Katey Kontent and Eve Ross and the rich young banker, Tinker Grey, who they meet on New Year’s Eve. They become fast friends, due mainly to Eve’s lack of inhibition, and spend the whole of 1938 exacting large influence in each other’s lives.

Katey is the quieter, smarter of the girls, a daughter of Russian immigrants, always reading Dickens and having to borrow clothes to look stylish. Eve is the headstrong instigator of mischief who cut ties with her family in Indiana to climb the Manhattan social ladder. Tinker, the poor lamb, is exactly what both girls want — for Katey a serious, well-read young man who is easy to talk to, for Eve an eligible bachelor who will buy her dinner at The Explorers Club.

Before this love triangle can become a real problem, the three are in a car accident which leaves Tinker and Katey unscathed, but Eve with a scar and a bum leg. Because he was driving and feels responsible, Tinker has Eve move into his Upper West Side apartment for her rehabilitation, and Katey starts drifting out of their lives.

Katey narrates the novel in the past tense. From the novel’s opening, which takes place at a Walker Evans exhibition in the 60s, we know that she is happy and married and on the wealthy side, so her retelling of her volatile 20s is in a voice combining an outsider’s vulnerability and a veteran’s wisdom. It’s reminiscent of Fitzgerald or Waugh, in that “what gay parties we all had in those days, until our inner demons simply couldn’t be repressed any longer” vein.

The tone may border on nostalgic. Amor Towles describes 1930s clothes and equipage and restaurants like they’re all magical. The dialogue may border on caricature, such as this intoxicated party exchange:

Dicky bowed, knocking a glass of gin into Roberto’s lap.

—“Mon Dieu, Roberto! Be a little more fleet of foot, man!”

—“Fleet of foot? You’ve ruined another pair of khaki trousers.”

—“Come now. You’ve a lifetime supply.”

—“Whatever the state of my supply, I demand an apology.”

—“Then you shall have one!”

But neither tone, dialogue, nor characters ever fully fall into camp. Everything is balanced by Katey’s calm, and Towles’ tendency to inject these merry scenes with advice, like “be careful when choosing what you’re proud of — because the world has every intention of using it against you,” or “As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion — whether they’re triggered by anger or envy, humiliation or resentment — if the next thing you’re going to say makes you feel better, then it’s probably the wrong thing to say.”

I find it fascinating that Amor Towles took on this particular subject and era. As I was reading, it was impossible to forget that the book is a 47-year-old investment banker’s debut novel. In an interview, he said, “I prefer to put myself in an environment that’s farther afield and look through the eyes of someone who differs from me in age, ethnicity, gender and/or social class. I think a little displacement makes me a sharper observer.” And yet, Towles doesn’t relish giving Katey girl friends. Besides Eve, Katey spends most of the book talking to men.

Observation is certainly Katey’s greatest gift. “The couples at the tables around us were engaged in conversations they’d been having for years,” she says, when Tinker takes her out for dinner. She spends the book bouncing back and forth between upper and lower class Manhattan. She doesn’t have Eve’s social ambition, but she does get around. Unmoored for a while from Tinker and Eve’s dominating personalities, she comes into her own.

Rules of Civility takes its name from the famous guide to decorum that George Washington copied down as a young man, which Tinker keeps with him. The novel examines how, by changing your attitudes, behaviors, and manners, you can reinvent yourself, and how Katey, Tinker, and Eve all did this in 1938. When Katey admires a sales clerk’s red hair, the clerk replies, “If I may be so bold, Miss Kontent, the color of my hair is available to you on the second floor.” In 1938 New York, it would seem that everything was available to you if you knew where to find it, how to dress, and how to hold your liquor.

Janet Potter
is a staff writer for The Millions. Janet is a freelance writer and semi-professional baker living in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in The Awl, The AV Club, the Chicago Reader, and Chicago Magazine. She is the co-host of YouTube's The Book Report and blogs about presidential biographies at At Times Dull. Follow her @sojanetpotter.

It’s official. I’m done!This month, I finally finished my Penguin Pockets 70th Anniversary Box Set. I read nearly every page over a broken, two-month period (the first month – my Millions debut – can be found here). It was a difficult, grueling battle, but I made it through with only a few bruises and just one small paper cut. And now, as I had always hoped, I have a full awareness of all things “literature.” I’m ready to start teaching World Lit at Harvard.Well, actually, I’m not. In fact, I’ve given myself an even greater test: I’m giving myself three years to fully comprehend at least one title from the classic authors I’ve (until now) completely missed.But that’s the future. This is the present. Revel with me as I celebrate this accomplishment!Choosing one of these selections as the “book of the month” turned out to be more difficult than actually reading them. I read 36 books this month: part of a classic (the very long, very complicated, incredibly wordy and not entirely pleasant A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens) and 35 54-page Pocket Penguins. That’s a lot of books to filter through.Obviously, I can’t choose any of the books that I didn’t really fully read or any of the books that I quickly skimmed through on my way to another selection. Yeah, that’s right. Sometimes I cheated. You can’t blame me – this entire collection features a wide array of genres: poetry (skimmed), history (primarily rooted in World War II, most of which I read, but honestly didn’t read fully and skimmed), biography (Churchill’s and Percy’s biographies were skimmed, Selassie’s outright skipped after the first ten pages) and memoir (many were skipped after a few pages). I couldn’t possibly do it all without screaming.This left me with about 20-25 works of fiction that I enjoyed at varying degrees.What I found is that this entire 70-book collection is really a celebration of the short story. When condensing an author into 54 pages, a publisher can only choose the shortest of selections. A majority of the time, this means a selection of short stories. When “true” short stories weren’t chosen, we find excerpts or expurgated chapters instead. Regardless of its original form, it’s a short story all the same. I was blind to it through the first 35 books, but this time it was all I could think of.Throughout the second half of my Anniversary travels, I marveled at how so many authors could sum up a literary career into just 54 pages – how they could completely buck the novel’s tradition and contain their words concisely into these Penguin selections.So with that in mind, I needed to choose one book – the one book that captures everything that short stories are to me: emotion, curiosity and mystery; ultimately, thought-provoking literature that drives me to read on and devour the next short story while still feeling the heat of the previous one.Enter Melissa Bank’s The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine. The Book of the Month.I have found that most short story writing involves a quick slice of life, one that reveals only as much as needed, leaving the reader a chance to fill in the gaping holes. A great short story fills those holes without much effort, using the power of its passages as an assumed backbone, driving characters together not through writing, but through the normal constraints of society and culture.Bank’s title story does a great job of doing this. In it we find a young woman – an assistant editor who is not entirely sure of her own talents – struggling with two relationships; a love/hate connection with her on-again-off-again boyfriend and a wait-and-see connection with her father, a once strong man who is dying from leukemia.The emotion is there – this is a young woman who doesn’t know what to do in life. We’ve all been there, obviously; unsure of our place, wondering if we chose the right life, the right partner, or the right career. In this case, we find a woman who is being overwhelmed through every aspect of life – at work, with an older boyfriend, and with her father’s sickness. She feels pulled in every direction, forced to accept her position editing books (a job that is quite below her position) and to accept the criticism from an older man – her personal father figure. All the while, her actual father is sick – very sick.The curiosity is there. Where did these people meet? Why has she made these decisions, and why does she continue to stick by them? How will her father end up, and will her boyfriend be there to support her. Is he drinking again?Is she safe with herself?As good as Bank’s story was, it all kept bringing me back to the style as a whole – the short story as a concept and viable literary interest. Short stories are designed to view a small, minute portion of life and weigh it against society. They’re created to leave a suspenseful impression, one that makes you wish you could know the rest of the story and one that – for just a few seconds – leaves you considering just writing the story yourself.Often times, this is exactly what happens. In your mind, you have the ability to fill in the holes, to create biographies based on the hints an author leaves behind. There’s no better writing prompt than a short story. And it seems sometimes like there’s no harder piece of literature to actually compose.It is said that poetry is literature condensed. It gives each word an incredible weight that cannot be reproduced in prose (lest it become too weighty and difficult). Short stories take the weight away from the words and give it to the moment. Each second of a shortened piece of literature means the world. It is intensely analyzed and purposefully constructed. For me, it’s the most perfect form of writing.So let’s hear it for short stories, eh? Let’s hear it for Lorrie Moore, for David Sedaris, and for Lewis Thomas. A round of applause for Ian McEwan, for Will Self, and for David Foster Wallace. And let’s not let the brevity of a short story ruin the weight of its moment in the spotlight.Corey Vilhauer – Black Marks on Wood PulpCVBoMC Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, June, July, Aug, Sept, Oct

Somebody needs to start a 12-step program for compulsive readers of presidential biographies. It can be a dangerous little addiction. My Millions colleague, Janet Potter, who is reading biographies of the 44 U.S. presidents in chronological order for her Presidential Biography Project, has reached Ulysses S. Grant, or President #18. I myself am nowhere near so ambitious or organized, but at last count I’ve read biographies of 11 of the 44, a fair number of them in multi-volume sets. In some contexts this might sound like boasting, but at the meetings of ARPBA (Addicted Readers of Presidential Biographies Anonymous), it would be recognized for what it is: a cry for help.

So when I heard about Thomas Mallon’s new novel, Watergate, I thought: Aha! Here’s a way to stay out of rehab and still kick the habit. I can read fictional presidential biographies. Mallon, author of eight novels, mostly on historical themes, has spun a fictional insider’s tale of the famed Nixon scandal that, for a hopeless junkie like me, held out the promise of a book-length methadone cure for my presidential biography jones.

Told from the point of view of numerous players in the Watergate saga, from the president on down to minor walk-ons like Mississippi-bred campaign operative Fred LaRue, Mallon’s novel is a dizzying high-wire act mixing fictional explanations of famous historical mysteries (how did Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods create that 18-minute gap?) with outright fictions (Plastic Pat Nixon, the president’s cipher of a wife, has a secret lover!). Mallon writes like a dream, and his mastery of the complex historical record and the equally byzantine folkways of Washington’s establishment class are staggering. But the book itself remains, for all its shining prose and historical insight, more of a literary achievement than an illuminating read.

This is unfortunate because Richard Nixon is in desperate need of better biographers, nonfictional and otherwise. It is an odd fact that Nixon, surely one of the most Shakespearian figures to hold the office occupied by that long rogue’s gallery of Iagos, Hamlets, and Lears, has yet to inspire a truly great biography. Stephen Ambrose’s three-volume Nixon is admirably thorough in all the ways that makes that sound like faint praise, and so many of the other writers to take Nixon on, like Rick Perlstein, whose Nixonland appeared in 2008, are so busy blaming Nixon for every bad thing that ever happened since he entered politics that the man himself gets lost. To my mind, the most convincing, and compelling, portraits of Nixon and his administration remain the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein originals, All the President’s Men and The Final Days, which is curious since those books were written largely on the fly while the Watergate scandal was still being fought out in the courts.

Mallon’s singular achievement in Watergate is to present Nixon and his co-conspirators not as the fright-mask caricatures they have become in popular culture, but as flesh-and-blood human beings trying, however crookedly, to run the country. Mallon performs this trick by making masterful use of close third-person narration, which allows him to bounce seamlessly from character to character and still give the reader access to those characters’ innermost thoughts and feelings. In one delicious scene, Mallon has a fuming Nixon attend the 1973 Washington Correspondents’ Association dinner, at which Woodward and Bernstein were honored for their trailblazing Watergate reporting:

The president looked at the three Washington Post tables just below the dias — a whole little government-in-exile presided over by [Post executive editor Ben] Bradlee, Jack Kennedy’s fellow cocksman; the two of them had fornicated their way into middle age like Harvard boys still panting outside the burlesque stage door in Boston.

But this rare chance to inhabit the minds of a gang of criminals hatching one of this country’s most notorious political crimes is also the novel’s fatal flaw. In Watergate, the scandal’s central figures, while occasionally aware that what they’re doing might be technically illegal, always see their actions as furthering the greater good of the United States. “I am not a crook,” Nixon famously declared during a press conference, and, in Mallon’s telling, it never seems to occur to him that he might be. Late in in the novel, as Nixon is flying home to California hours after delivering his mawkish farewell address to his staff and resigning the presidency, Mallon has a damp-eyed Nixon tell his wife:

I don’t know how it happened, how it began. Half the time I hear myself on those tapes I realize I’m barely remembering who works for who over at the Committee [to Re-Elect the President]. I hear myself acting like I know more than I do — pretending to be on top of the thing so I don’t embarrass myself with whoever’s in the room — especially [presidential advisor John] Erlichman. Christ, I can’t now apologize for what I can barely understand!

This is, as history, fanciful — Nixon was far too good a manager and politician not to know exactly who worked for him on his re-election team — but, worse, as literature it is mendacious. It is as if at the end of Othello, Shakespeare gave Iago a speech saying he couldn’t remember just how that handkerchief ended up in Cassio’s hands. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is as if at the end of the play Shakespeare turned Iago into a doddering, ill, self-pitying King Lear, howling insensibly among the rustling palm trees in San Clemente, always and forever “more sinn’d against than sinning.”

One could argue that such reflexive self-justification is inevitable in a novel that aims to give us a view of the scandal from the inside out, but I don’t think so. Mallon follows enough characters to fill a cell block, but all of them are, in one way or another, inside the Nixonian tent. LaRue, the Mississippi operative and bagman, is as close as the book comes to a protagonist, as is indicated by the fact that he is granted an invented — and entirely bogus — side plot involving an investigation into his role in the shooting death of his father during a hunting trip. But LaRue, who in real life was an early proponent of Nixon’s cynical, and deeply racist, “Southern strategy” to bring the once-Democratic South into the Republican column by playing to the region’s fear of black power, is a True Believer in Richard Nixon from start to finish. LaRue doesn’t experience a crisis of faith, or learn that his hero has feet of clay. He just thinks the break-in was a stupid waste of time and resources, and wishes, like the rest of the gang, that they hadn’t gotten caught.

Some of the other characters, particularly Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the rapier-tongued octogenarian daughter of Teddy Roosevelt, and even Plastic Pat, whose portrayal as a quietly passionate woman loyal to a marriage that no longer really makes human sense is the book’s most revelatory, are a lot of fun to be around, but they too are Nixon partisans. All Mallon had to do was follow one outsider — a reporter like Seymour Hersh, say, who worked the story for The New York Times; or one of the Republican politicians, of whom there were many, who finally broke with the president over the scandal — and he could have cracked the book wide open. After all, what gives those early Woodward and Bernstein books their lasting power isn’t merely the thrill of the chase, but the poignancy of insiders like Deep Throat, later revealed to be FBI Associate Director Mark Felt, who believed passionately in their government and were at the same time disgusted by what it was doing.

But Mallon, for all his talent and insight, doesn’t want to take that risk, because to do so would expose Watergate for what it was, a laughably pointless and ill-conceived but nevertheless grievous crime against the American system of government. Mallon has said in interviews that he is a moderate Republican, which is to say he is a Nixonian Republican before Nixon the man let his pathologies get the better of Nixon the president. One cannot read this book without thinking that, in key elements of structure and characterization, Mallon the partisan got the better of Mallon the novelist.

In this, of course, he is no worse than countless liberals who, to this day, brainlessly invoke the jowly Nixon mask to personify all that is wrong with this country, but then he isn’t any better, either. In the end, Watergate is not a whitewash. The book is too well-written, too smart about people and politics for that. But it isn’t really history, either. It is history by other means, the made-up kind.

It’s probably not a surprise to anyone that, in its early years, Twitter suffered from a lot of internal turmoil. After all, the company has cycled through three different CEOs in four years. But the power struggle depicted in Nick Bilton’sHatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal is likely far greater than anyone could have imagined. Culling from some 65 hours of interviews with current and former Twitter employees, in addition to employee emails, IMs, and confidential legal notices, Bilton has used all his access to write a compelling exposé of Twitter’s cofounders — a startup soap opera for the Valleywag age.

From the ruins of the stalled podcasting startup Odeo, Twitter emerged in 2006 as an idea then-nobody programmer Jack Dorsey had about “status updates.” Later that year, he, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone would dismantle Odeo to work on Twitter full time, which is more or less where the good times ended. The company would struggle under Dorsey’s “incompetent” leadership as CEO, Williams would take over, and later be replaced himself by current CEO Dick Costolo, with Dorsey also being brought back onboard. Costolo and Stone are mentioned throughout the book, but remain largely background characters. Bilton centers Hatching Twitter around the relationship between Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams because that’s where all the melodrama is.

The book seems to generally come down harder on Dorsey than it does on Williams, but Bilton discovers an interesting divide in what each cofounder believes Twitter should be. Dorsey sees Twitter as an outlet to express oneself outward, while Williams’s vision is based around telling stories about people. These philosophical differences influence the site’s technical development as well. (Dorsey, for example, believes in focusing on mobile while Williams believes more time should be put toward the website.) In one of the book’s best moments, Dorsey and Williams are arguing about whether the pre-populated question in the status update box should ask the user “what are you doing?” or “what’s happening?” Bilton writes:

To many this might sound like semantics. Yet these were two completely different ways of using Twitter. Was it about me, or was it about you? Was it about ego, or was it about others? In reality, it was about both. One never would have worked without the other.

Here, Bilton is accomplishing several things at once: he’s remarking on the thoughtful subtleties that made Twitter so powerful, illustrating the conceptual divide between Jack and Ev, and developing their irreconcilable relationship to the reader.

It’s unfortunate that we don’t see more of this throughout the book. Later, it becomes clear Bilton is interested in painting Dorsey as a tragic figure, a 28 year old who came to Odeo to work with industry role models and friends, whose creation of Twitter would ironically sever those ties he sought so desperately to make. It feels like a stretch, especially at the end when, in a moment of loneliness, Dorsey dramatically checks Twitter.

In fact, the entire theme of loneliness throughout Hatching Twitter comes across as particularly facile. Bilton attributes a shared sense of isolation as the genesis for Twitter:

It could be a technology that would erase a feeling that an entire generation felt while staring into their computer screens. An emotion that Noah and Jack and Biz and Ev had grown up feeling, finding solace in a monitor. An emotion that Noah [Glass] felt night after night as his marriage and company fell apart: loneliness.

In a book where Bilton touts the accuracy of what he details in an author’s note, Hatching Twitter still feels like it’s constantly making leaps when it comes to its subjects’ motives and emotions. Many of these sections are notably light on quotations in a book that is otherwise so abundant with them.

It’s disappointing to watch Bilton commit to such an obvious trope: the despair of the lonely computer nerd. Dorsey is drawn as a caricature of a developer, a man-child whose desires have the maturity of an early high schooler. There’s a moment, too, when Dorsey’s relationship with Odeo founder Noah Glass is sullied when he becomes jealous of Glass’s friendship with another coworker named Crystal Taylor. Dorsey’s infatuation is solidified early on when Taylor teaches him what “texting” is — making a crush literally the inspiration for Twitter.

The moment reminded me of something Mark Zuckerberg said after seeing The Social Network. According to Zuckerberg, the most inaccurate part of the movie is the way it’s framed. Aaron Sorkin’s version of Zuckerberg is motivated by getting back at an ex-girlfriend; in real life, Zuckerberg had been dating the same girl since Facebook’s inception.

“It’s such a big disconnect from the way people who make movies think about what we do in Silicon Valley — building stuff,” Zuckerberg said. “They just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.”

Similar comments were echoed by Dorsey’s boss at Odeo, Tony Stubblebine, in a Quora post about the accuracy of Bilton’s adapted excerpt of Hatching Twitterfrom The New York Times Magazine. Is the notion that Dorsey just wants to be in control of a product he’s created so unbelievable or so unconvincing that his motives need to be supplemented by adolescent jealousy?

And yet while the characters featured in Hatching Twitter feel more like archetypes than actual humans, it’s hard not to eat this stuff up. Aspects of Dorsey’s behavior are hilariously juvenile. After being ousted from the company, he continued to take any and all interviews about Twitter, feigning authority when answering questions he did not know the answer to. Dorsey would also set up meetings with his @twitter.com email address as a bait-and-switch to talk about his new startup Square (he would have his email address revoked).

Bilton has an excellent sense of pace, and there are several scenes — in particular, the chapter where Dorsey gets fired — that are exciting enough to be lifted word-for-word into a film adaptation. Of course, this all depends how exciting you can find a chapter cliffhanger that ends with someone calling Mark Zuckerberg. In the final pages of Hatching Twitter, I questioned whether the book really had anything meaningful to say about Twitter, its founders, or even any of the tumultuous things that transpired between them. Bilton is less concerned about what Twitter is and more interested in the human drama between its founders. The company itself is just the battleground for an ego-driven power struggle, and as gripping as it is to see some of the smartest minds in tech tell each other to go fuck themselves, I couldn’t help but feel like I had just read nearly 300 pages of privileged white men yelling at each other.

We lost a great soul in the world of writing with the passing of David Rakoff, a writer who wrote with equal measures moody nostalgia and clear-eyed nihilism. Rakoff was no Hunter S. Thompson, or even David Sedaris — his stories did not come from great calamities of family, or of the road, or of a hijinks-ridden life. Instead, they emerged, like slow-cooked barbecue basted in sugar and vinegar, from Rakoff’s perspective on everyday life. He was the quintessential essayist, one whose voice made any subject worth attending to, and that voice made the incidentals of any experience worthwhile.

Writers that can draw inspiration from within, not from without, are rare, and we’ll be hard-pressed to find an heir to Rakoff’s legacy. Many memoirists seem to find their material through premeditated sprees of fuck-up-itude, going on the premise that “everything is copy,” and letting things fall to pieces in the hopes that it’ll eventually be memoir-worthy. Such is the case in Davy Rothbart’sMy Heart is an Idiot, a collection of essays focused on chronicling relationships — romantic and platonic — that never settle out the way they should.

There’s nothing wrong with writing about bad romances or bad sex — after all, they don’t write songs about the loves that come easy. But the laziness with which Rothbart’s hookups and hangouts are depicted, highlighting major moments of failure without meditating on their significance, indicates a troubling trend in young memoirs. It takes more than experience to make a narrative voice, and not every failure or triumph should be destined for memoirization.

The unifying theme, if there is any, of Rothbart’s collection is of the frustrated and interrupted searches for love and connection in the modern world. Some of these moments play out like great capers, as in the best essay, “Human Snowball,” in which Rothbart, a 110-year-old bus passenger, a Chinese family, and a buddy destined to end up in prison all cram into a Ford Explorer in search of a long-lost love and find a winning lottery ticket instead.

Serendipity seems to guide most of Rothbart’s escapades, and when his renegade optimism is not rewarded, he goes off the rails. When Rothbart discovers that a writing contest turns out to be a scam, his form of vengeance involves, among other things, mailed bottles of Nantucket Nectars filled with his own urine. Not all the stories show Rothbart at his most infantile, and the most moving of them all, “New York, New York,” details a bus ride from Chicago to New York in the days immediately following 9/11. Rothbart’s not shy about interacting with his fellow passengers, who range from utterly shell-shocked to fully loquacious. But at the very moment he seems to be genuinely connecting with people, the narrative always withdraws, makes itself impersonal once more. As the passengers disembark at Port Authority, Rothbart says, “On a thousand-mile bus trip like that, after all those interviews and brief but intense conversations, I would’ve gathered a slew of e-mail addresses and made a dozen new Facebook friends. But that was another time, before the souls we cross paths with could be collected like passport stamps, and I never saw or heard from any of those people again.” Instead of digging deep into a moment of transitory friendship, into the dazed confusion of those early days of national uncertainty, Rothbart briefly reduces his experience to a moment of failed networking.

This is not to say that Rothbart is cavalier about his relationships — but rather, he lacks the ability to communicate his emotional investment, whether powerful or non-existent, to the reader. You especially feel this in stories about his romantic escapades, where his admiration — of a girl’s hair, lips, swing of her hips — gets only slightly more space than his rejection or remorse. He can fall for a girl through a series of exchanged emails (as in the essay “Shade”), only to decide upon meeting her that “our whole chemistry seemed off.” (The title comes from the movie Gas Food Lodging. A character from that film, a trailer-park teen girl named Shade, utterly bewitches the young Rothbart, a character he called “the love of my life.” The guy bought stock in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl at seventeen, and hasn’t been able to shake the obsession since.) The depictions of these kinds of women aren’t so much misogynistic or even offensive — there’s not enough attention to them to become deeply invested in their fates or in what Rothbart thinks of them.

Moreover, the moments that might prompt greater description, or greater examination on what drives love, or lust, or obsession, are almost always abbreviated, to the point where the reader is regularly prompted to ask, “Is that all there is?” Skimping on the details that would take the stories from attitudinal to authentic — in the essay, “Tarantula,” which chronicles a drunken hook-up, a waterlogged corpse, and the title spider among other things, the best moment comes in transit. Rothbart’s girl of the night, a bartender as “skinny as a signpost” with a “sideways smile” tells him to hide under a tarp in the back of her pickup truck, so they can leave for the night without her fiancé hearing about it later. Rothbart complies, and she slips into the truck 30 minutes later and they take off.

I peeled off the tarp and lay on my back looking at the dull comets of orange streetlights overhead, until we hit a dirt road and they trailed off, replaced by a few cooling stars. Thinking back, this was probably the only worthwhile, positive part of the night — the thrumming anticipation, the cold air ripping over my face, the truck’s surefire vroom-vrooms as we tore like a shot arrow toward somewhere mysterious.

This brief description, one of the few that details a landscape or perspective more than a friend’s tattoos or a girlfriend’s eyeliner, hints that Rothbart knows what parts of the story might drive anticipation. Yet his voice remains so passive, so stage direction-y, that such moments lose their power almost immediately, and are never expanded upon later. He tips his hand at the description’s intended effect before he moves us, and the foreshadowing is wasted.

The impulse to memoirize isn’t a bad one, even on the part of the young and reckless — I’ve spent hours on end devouring the first season of Girls and underlining sentence after sentence of Sheila Heti’s extraordinary How Should a Person Be? What makes stories worth telling is not what happened, but how what happened made something else happen to the teller. And the true stories that we remember — from the Burroughs, the Karrs, the Nabokovs and Rakoffs of the world — didn’t just serve up the events of their day planner or black book. They spun them into glittering tales of experience. “I needed a cover story,” Rothbart said in “Shade,” and you can see it in every story in this collection, each essay that yearns to be “collection-worthy.” “What I craved and had been chasing…was the exquisite misery I’d felt when I’d first seen Shade on the screen. That wrenching longing was its own perfect drug, and as long as a girl kept me at arm’s length and maintained a distance, some veil of mystery, then my excruciating and exhilarating ache could be preserved.”

In the last volume published before his death, the morbidly funny collection of essays, Half Empty, Rakoff had wise words for a writer like Rothbart. “Even the most charmed life is a veritable travelogue of disappointment. There will always be an inevitable gulf between hope and reality. It is how we traverse these Deserts of Letdown that show us what we are made of (perhaps almost as much as does choosing to characterize them as Deserts of Letdown).” The thing that makes great memoir is not the road we journey down, but the details and attitude we use to chronicle the journey. I’d be curious to see if Rothbart, turning his attention to a more mundane story — a flat tire on the side of the highway, a dead-end desk job, a delayed flight to a nondescript city — would suddenly reveal himself to be a born storyteller, telling tales that served up more than highs and lows, but all the mysterious moments in-between.

In the late David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King, IRS employee Claude Sylvanshine is a “fact psychic.” This means he is periodically overwhelmed with cascades of “ephemeral, useless, undramatic, distracting” information about other people. When he eats a cupcake, for instance, he knows where it comes from, who baked it, and a sprinkling of vital statistics about its baker–his “weight, shoe size, bowling average, American Legion career batting average.” As the details proliferate, it becomes obvious that the sum does not add up to a person. What Sylvanshine learns about others isn’t, and can’t be, insight: it arrives with no context and no narrative, touched off by minimal contact or none at all, and he has no means of organizing or using what he knows. The information is raw, “fractious, boiling,” and its accumulation oppresses him. Some of it presents visually, “queerly backlit, as by an infinitely bright light an infinite distance away.” Sylvanshine’s gift gives him a headache.

Wallace himself, of course, was something of a fact psychic, possessed of freakishly sensitive awareness and unsure of its human use. To read his work is to encounter great drifts of detail, drifts which have contributed, along with his books’ sheer length, to the perception of his work as excessive or maximalist. Wyatt Masonnotes in The New York Review of Books that those who characterize Wallace’s fiction this way sometimes imply a failure of control or restraint, as if “however smart he was, he wasn’t smart enough to write fiction that didn’t distract the reader with yieldless shows of virtuosity.” But Wallace’s canonization, now close to complete, means these criticisms no longer have much bite. Mostly we feel that Wallace’s headlong, encyclopedic, garrulous manner was born of necessity, not indulgence, that the stylistic innovations, including the massed detail, grew not from vanity but from some kind of mimetic imperative to reflect back to us our dizzy, painful, teeming, inconclusive lives.

This vision of Wallace is of an artist in full possession of his art, his every choice considered and confident. Even so, D.T. Max, writing for The New Yorker, finds traces in the years before Wallace’s death of a different sort of author, one who had come to doubt the style he’d become known for and grown dissatisfied with himself as a writer, even believing, Max suggests, that he might not be “the kind of person who could write the novel he wanted to write.” How deep this unease went it’s impossible to say, though it does seem that Wallace was conscious early on of the costs exacted by his stylistic choices. In a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, he worried about writing “sentences that [were] syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them.” Still, if he was aware of the risks of his approach, he seemed certain, at least in 1993, that they were worth running. About his project at the time (probably Infinite Jest), he said, “Whether I can provide a payoff and communicate a function rather than just seem jumbled and prolix is the issue that’ll decide whether the thing I’m working on now succeeds or not.”

An unfinished novel almost by definition doesn’t provide a payoff or carry out its “function.” This means we can’t know whether the unfinished book was also unfinishable, an insoluble puzzle. (Though some novels–Kafka’sCastle for example–seem more eloquent and even “successful” for being incomplete.) Certainly Wallace had set himself a problem masochistic or quixotic in its difficulty: how to write an interesting novel about that byword for tedium, the IRS? And how to write a religious novel–which is what The Pale King is, in its preoccupation with grace, illumination, and purpose–about the most disenchanted and secular of professions, namely accounting? Employees of the IRS, fact psychics or not, don’t want for hard numbers. The question is whether, along with the data, they can acquire a sense of vocation and vision, of meaningful work in a meaningful world. It is a question whose implications point inward, to the novelist’s own profession, and outward, to the status of human activity generally in what we have come to call an “information society.”

If Infinite Jest was about addiction, entertainment and distraction–about avoiding the truth–The Pale King is about the opposite phenomena of boredom and attention, about staring at the world instead of looking away. And if Infinite Jest was quintessentially a novel about fuckups and misfits, The Pale King is a novel about reliable employees, people who go to work each day and get there on time. Claude Sylvanshine is one of a handful of primary characters, low-level IRS employees mainly (many of them rote examiners, or “wigglers,” in IRS lingo), whose stories appear and reappear over the course of the book’s 539 pages. Among these narratives, assembled from Wallace’s manuscripts and notes by his longtime editor Michael Pietsch, glimmers a constellation of minor characters, all linked by their association with “the Service.” The relations among the cast blink on and off as the book progresses, alternately intensifying or falling away. There is no central protagonist per se, unless you count David Wallace, the self-described author of what he claims is a memoir written primarily for financial gain.

Not a lot happens in The Pale King, exactly. The plot, such as it is, emerges from a left turn in early-eighties-era tax policy Wallace calls the Spackman Initiative, an attempt to narrow the tax gap (the shortfall between what is owed to the government and what is actually collected) by increasing the efficiency of collection (essentially, cracking down on non-compliance) so that the government can lower marginal tax rates without losing revenue. As their elephantine employer struggles to reinvent itself, the wigglers, in varying states of mental and bodily discomfort, writhe in place: “R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ann Williams sniffs slightly and turns a page. Meredith Rand does something to a cuticle.” Wallace wants us to see what the examiners, at the height of their boredom, can’t, quite: the relation of the human skeleton to the bureaucratic thumb bone turning the page.

The world of The Pale King is, with a few exaggerations and inventions, our world, where the baroquely ramified division of labor has given rise to jobs only distantly related to their purpose. The low-level examiners at the Midwest Regional Examination Center suffer a common plight: jobs of drastic tedium and invisible value. Some employees try to survive, improbably but amusingly, by treating their work as a vocation in the religious sense of the term. So Chris Fogle is bewitched by the eerily composed teacher of a high-level accounting class who describes tax preparation as a heroic calling. “Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is,” the teacher declares, absurdly, as if he were a POW. In Fogle’s moment of conversion, the physical world amplifies, details announce themselves, and Fogle sees so much so keenly that he can intuit even the little he can’t see:

I was aware of how every detail in the classroom appeared very vivid and distinct, as though painstakingly drawn and shaded, and yet also of being completely focused on the substitute Jesuit, who was saying all this very dramatic or even romantic stuff without any of the usual trappings or flourishes of drama, standing now quite still with his hands again behind his back (I knew the hands weren’t clasped–I could somehow tell that he was more like holding the right wrist with the left hand) and his face’s planes unshadowed in the white light.

Advanced Tax isn’t the first place Fogle has looked for redemption. In his earlier “wastoid” phase, he tells us, he took a drug called Obetrol for the quality of consciousness it afforded, especially “an ability to choose what one concentrates on” which differentiated it from smoking pot. Pot made you think about whatever your eyes lit upon, but Obetrol let you select and name your perceptions–“The cigarette burn is black and imperfectly round.” It was this final level of awareness, Fogle says, which he calls “doubling”–perceiving yourself perceiving, aware you are aware–that made the feeling special. Accounting appeals to him aesthetically–it is orderly, and in its orderliness, beautiful–but also (hilariously) spiritually.

A similar state of awareness possesses Meredith Rand when she engages a hyper-perceptive examiner named Drinion at a bar. Under Drinion’s observation she receives an infusion of attention like nothing she’s ever experienced. Importantly, the experience reminds her of paying attention herself. Here is another of Wallace’s spiraling (and attentive) sentences:

The only kind of experience she could associate with it involved their cat that she’d had when she was a girl before it got hit by a car and the way she could sit with the cat in her lap and stroke the cat and feel the rumble of the cat’s purring and feel every bit of the texture of the cat’s warm fur and the muscle and bone beneath that, and that she could sit for long periods of time stroking the cat and feeling it with her eyes half-shut as if she was spaced out or stuporous-looking but had felt, in fact, like she was the opposite of stuporous–she felt totally aware and alive, and at the same time when she sat slowly stroking the cat with the same motion over and over it was like she forgot her name and address and almost everything else about her life for ten or twenty minutes, even though it wasn’t like spacing out at all, and she loved that cat.

As Wallace inventories the varieties of distraction and absorption, he proposes that the burden of meaningfulness falls not on the task or the object at hand, but on the quality of the attention paid. It is one’s orientation to work that matters, not the substance of the work, one’s orientation to circumstance, not the circumstance itself. Happiness nests in perception.
Such a proposal unavoidably implicates the experience of reading this book. Also, more generally, the experience of reading itself. Does it matter what you read, or only how? In the case of The Pale King, I discovered that my eye sometimes wanted to trace zig zags instead of mowing steadily from one page to the next. Almost invariably I took the numbers and names pertaining to tax code as atmospheric and skimmed them. I at first resented the trademark footnotes. (But grew to love them: many explain vital information, and one even contains a blow job, or footjob, as I’m tempted to call it). As one might expect given Wallace’s sensibility, events receive a swirling, almost obfuscating treatment, the event itself nearly effaced by context or interpretation. It can be hard to figure out what’s happening, who’s talking, who’s who. But what generated the most readerly friction for me was not the quantity of detail so much as the difficulty of knowing how to take it. By non-avant garde standards, a detail is doing its job if you don’t question its function, if it fills out the portrait without puncturing it. But Wallace wants punctures. To McCaffery, he said he wanted to “antagonize” the reader, then corrected this to “aggravate” for its suggestion of intensification. (Or inflammation, I kept thinking: the detail as mosquito bite or bee sting). So we are more than once reminded that what is called Level 2 of the Midwest Regional Examination Center is not, as one would assume, the second floor, but actually the ground floor, due to an aborted excavation project. Such a detail says something about the contorted bureaucratic nature of the REC, but also suggests that the information will be necessary in terms of plot, that we’ll “need” it for something later on. But these hints are more often than not teases, tricks, feints.

Wallace’s characters themselves worry about such questions–what is the point of all this elaborateness? They frequently ponder the very elements that, in a less self-conscious book, would be charged with making them real to us. In a conversation about drug experiences in the sixties, an unnamed character complains, “I’m saying if I say Baxter-Bathing or Owsley or mention Janis’s one dress she wore you think in terms of data. There’s none of the feeling attached to it–this was a feeling. It’s impossible to describe.” Similarly, he isn’t concerned that “Sweater Puppies” produce no nostalgia, he’s concerned that they produce no feeling at all, that the fact, isolated, has no emotional valence.

In a day-long training session the new IRS recruits are taught something similar about the insufficiency of mere information. “Get rid of the layman’s idea that information is good,” two trainers tell a batch of trainees, among whom sits the fact psychic Sylvanshine. “That the more information the better. The phone book has lots of information, but if you’re looking for a phone number, 99.9 percent of that information is just in the way.” Sylvanshine’s interest is piqued as the second trainer chimes in: “Information per se is really just a measure of disorder.” The examiner’s job is ultimately the ability to sniff out a return worth auditing. The best can bypass vast amounts of meaningless information and in the exercise of his intuition concentrate on that small subset which is meaningful, a task any virtuosic performance of which requires virtuosic powers of attention. Thus the bureaucratic import of an examiner like Drinion, whose immense powers Wallace literalizes by making Drinion actually levitate as his focus crystallizes.

Drinion holds the mental secrets that, replicated, are the key to the IRS’s new goals. Capture Drinion’s tricks and the IRS can do away with its main obstacle–the limitations of the humble examiner. AAnd if the examiner’s needs are everyone’s needs–for stimulation, for a job whose value is visible, for work that requires skill and affords pleasure–there is something worrisome at work in Wallace’s fictionalized IRS. The Pale King closes, at least in Pietsch’s reconstruction, with a mysterious chapter in which an unidentified subject appears to study the techniques of deep concentration. “The way we start is to relax and become aware of the body,” a graying, pleasant-faced woman instructs. “It is at the level of the body that we proceed. Do not try to relax.” The subject must learn how to relax, presumably, so that he can work more efficiently, so that he can generate more revenue, so that the bureaucracy can grow. The mantras of meditation, co-opted in service of the Service.

The unfinished quality of the book means there is something especially undecidable about such a scene. Is Wallace in earnest when he proposes that anything at all, even tax examination, can be the object of religious mindfulness? Or is he parodying such a view? Probably he is doing both. After all, the optimistic proposition that how we interpret our lives determines our experience shades easily into a more sinister one. If the burden is on us to make the best of any awful circumstance, such a suggestion can be bent to excuse any amount of awfulness. Wallace seemed truly to believe in the virtues of attention and its capacity to afford grace, as can be seen from his now-famous commencement address at Kenyon College. And yet The Pale King reveals a tormenting quality to relentless mindfulness, to an unrelieved awareness of the world. Claude Sylvanshine, buried under the clutter of everything he knows, fears there is basically something wrong with him, that he is “simply ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs.” He suffers because he can’t exercise any authority over his perceptions, can’t choose, can no more piece together meaning from the fact-shards raining down on him from other people’s lives than he can from his own experience. This is Sylvanshine’s lament: “What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shades of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?” And in it we hear the terrible sound of Wallace’s own worry.

When it first became known that The Pale King existed it seemed especially tragic that Wallace hadn’t left us with a finished manuscript, and it is. And yet the book’s inconclusiveness keeps alive his questions, and ours, in a way a completed work wouldn’t. After my first reading was over, as I returned to certain parts, seeking out this or that thing I’d liked or thought I’d misunderstood, previously opaque information revealed itself to mean something, and the book, wonderfully, seemed to move and breathe. But this is an unfinished novel, one arranged (if quite beautifully) by someone else’s hand. As much sense as it settles into, it will still escape us. It escaped him.

It is the summer of 1970, a “hot, endless, and erotically decisive summer,” and Keith Nearing—twenty-year-old University-of-London-student (English Literature), occupying “that much disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven”—takes up residence in an Italian castle, accompanied by his girlfriend Lily—“5’5”, 34-25-34,” also a fellow student (law), on-again after a brief but fraught respite initiated by Lily’s desire to “act like a boy”—and Lily’s best friend, the nobly-born and enticingly-named Scheherazade—“5’10”, 37-23-33,” only very recently transformed from an unremarkable, bespectacled do-gooder into a swan-necked, amply-bosomed goddess. And because vital statistics, as Keith well knows, are destiny, his own fate seems already determined: he will feel bound to Lily, bound by gratitude and compatibility and history; he will desire Scheherazade, desire her madly, greedily, recklessly.

This is the basic premise of Martin Amis’sThe Pregnant Widow, and it is a simple premise really: a love triangle powered by youthful lust and a suitably exotic locale. Then again, maybe not so simple, for Keith is, of course, “a K in a castle,” which lends the proceedings an air of ominous possibility. And there is the matter too of the time, the historical context, the summer of 1970, portentous beginning of the Age of Narcissus, the self-reflective, self-absorbed, seemingly endless “All and Now” follow-up to the Age of Aquarius, whose tentative stirrings have given way to full-on revolution. (You know how sexual intercourse began in 1963, sometime around the release of The Beatles’ first LP? Well, by the time we get to our castle in Montale, The Beatles have broken up.) And revolutions, well, revolutions are…complicated, cutting a swath of collateral damage, and The Pregnant Widow—subtitle: “Inside History”—chronicles the sublime chasm between world orders new and old, the “long night of chaos and desolation” that must pass “between the death of the one and the birth of the other.” (This vision of destruction comes courtesy of the philosopher Alexander Herzen, whose observation that “the departing world leaves behind it, not an heir, but a pregnant widow” also lends the novel its title.)

Here then are the clauses of the Revolutionary Manifesto, as documented after-the-fact (though the bulk of the book focuses on the crucial summer, the narrative reaches into the present-day):

“There will be sex before marriage.”
“Women, also, have carnal appetites.”
“Surface will start tending to supersede essence.”
Sex will be separated from feeling, much like feeling was long ago detached from thought, and sex will also be separated from thought.

How Keith will navigate the new normal, find his footing on terrain much longed for but little understood, furnishes the narrative’s true interest. This is not so say that The Pregnant Widow is preoccupied with Big Ideas at the expense of development and action; there is, in fact, much by way of plot.

The castle—property of Scheherazade’s thirty-year-old uncle, Jorquil (“it was that kind of family”)—is equipped with wings and turrets and a pool, where the newly beautiful, newly liberated Scheherazade sunbathes topless and learns to love her own reflection, but it quickly grows crowded. As the summer gets underway, Keith, Lily, and Scheherazade are intermittently joined by Whitaker and Amen, an older English expat and his eighteen-year-old Libyan boyfriend; by the Scheherazade-admiring Adriano, a dashing aristocrat, who also happens to be 4’10”; by the Dakotan divorcee Prentiss, who has in tow her recently adopted twelve-year-old Mexican daughter, Conchita, and her grossly obese helpmate, Dodo; by the Sphinx-like Gloria Beautyman—“5’5”, 33-22-37”— whose riddle is concealed behind a body joining a dancer’s upper half with a bottom that earns her the nickname “Junglebum;” by Timmy, Scheherazade’s erstwhile boyfriend, returning from a stint in Jerusalem, where he had gone to convert the Jews; by Rita, known as “the Dog” (because “she reminds you of a dog”), a proud warrior of the Sexual Revolution. These interlopers lend the novel a Dickensian texture, an impression further abetted by their tendency towards resonant if improbable names (though this is of course also quite consistent with Amis’s typical style) and memorable quirks. They take in the sights and the swimming, the splendid dinners and the lovely grounds, and, in return, they full-heartedly immerse themselves in castle life, sometimes aiding, sometimes impeding Keith’s schemes to seduce Scheherazade without hurting the suspicious Lily.

Will Keith succeed? Perhaps the more pertinent question is, will Keith survive? Will Keith—literally the orphaned son of a pregnant widow, his father having died in a car accident on his way to the hospital, his bereaved mother quickly following in childbirth—emerge intact, integrated in thought and feeling? Will he master and navigate and accept the new ideology, the new world order his moment in history makes him heir to? Armed with nothing more than the English literary canon, Keith at first seems to stand little chance. Clarissa, he surmises, is boring, with its “one fuck in two thousand pages,” its heroine who must die of shame. But Keith’s reading and Keith’s experiences finally prove that revolutions in sex, like revolutions in literature, change only the surface, the wording, not the import, and though The Pregnant Widow could never be confused for, say, an Austen novel, there is something old-fashioned about it. Perhaps it is its sincerity, a real attempt to tell some essential truth, a truth at once of its time and timeless. Perhaps it is its investment in its characters and its worldview. Or its quiet humor, funny and cutting and sly. Or its intelligence, its knowingness, which never seems pretentious or irrelevant. Which is a long way to say that there is much to recommend it.

A great deal has been said, in recent reviews of The Pregnant Widow, about Amis’s return to form, his artistic success after a series of disappointments. (Indeed, there was some surprise when the book was conspicuously left off the Man Booker Prize longlist.) Like Philip Roth, to whom he has been compared since the beginning of his career, Amis seems to be initiating his sixties by embarking on an ambitious, historically-minded project with keen insight and masterly sentences. But this is, of course, speculation. Something more definitive then: The Pregnant Widow is a stunning book; it contains within it all that is best in the English novel.